Indiscriminate contemplations

Software

What’s better than SSL everywhere? Free SSL everywhere! I first heard about the letsencrypt.org project at Defcon 23 in July (you can watch the same presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya6t8nMclos). The concept was great, and I agreed with many of the points that were made, although the difficulty of setting up TLS was quite overblown, it really isn’t that difficult. I was interested in the concept, but at that time the project was not available for use, but now it is, and it’s fairly easy to use, though does have one minor drawback.

In an attempt to fix some service issues that I had been experiencing with Comcast, I contacted them on the phone to swap out my cablemodem with a new DOCSIS v.3 model that I had picked up. The rep on the phone insisted that I was paying too much, and proceeded to make changes to my account to fix how much I was paying. Long story short, my cable bill shot up to over $300/month. This fed me up enough to find a way to finally join a growing number of people and “cut the cord”. My issue was that I wanted to find a way to cut the cord, without losing access to the content that my family enjoys. This is where I turned my attention to the SlingTV.

Hadn’t updated my blog back-end in a couple years, so decided to take a look at what was new with MovableType, my choice of back-end software for blogging needs. Unfortunately, it seems that sometime last year sixapart decided to move away from even providing a single blogger account level license. I’ve loved working with MT over the years, but that change is enough to make me jump ship, so I started looking for alternatives. WordPress was an obvious choice. The process I followed to convert my site content is as follows:

Debian stable just jumped from the previous etch 4 to the new lenny 5. For those looking for an easy upgrade path, there actually isn’t much to it. I ran through an upgrade a short while ago and if you’re interested in the process, here were the steps I followed: